I wanted to start a thread about our experiences and what we have learned on our journey over the past year and a half. I should have done this a while ago, but didn’t feel comfortable posting real-time day to day personal experiences. But now, in hind site have some experiences and things to share for men interested in chastity and feeling the draw of wanting something different from their relationship, intimacy and sexual experiences.
(Note that this is what we did and what has worked for us. There are as many paths and reasons to do something as there are people and couples. I think our background and experiences will resonate with a certain population, and I hope this helps give some ideas. I know for others, their motivations for things like chastity may be vastly different.)
My wife and I had hit a wall, after having had children, raising them, work life, school life, all the day to day. Our “us” relationship had all but disappeared, with all of the typical symptoms. Lack of desire, distance, lack of communication, distractions like masturbation and porn, emotional disconnect (from ourselves and each other), and we had no idea what to do about it.
A few years ago we did start working on ourselves, understanding our history, learned scripts from childhood and why we behaved the way we did. Why we weren’t able to talk about our needs and desires, me disconnected from my emotions, her from her sexuality. We had no idea what we needed for ourselves, much less for each other.
Then, a little over a year ago I found Devotional Sex (http://www.devotionalsex.com/), which provided a great framework for us to begin to build a dynamic between us that started to re-balance our masculine and feminine energy and sexuality, to focus less on male penis/orgasm driven sex and start to put her needs and desires more as the focus. We struggled with this because of…well, learned behavior. The foundation of Devotional Sex has 4 commitments for him and 4 for her, and says:
Devotional Sex is when HE commits to:
K1: having far fewer ejaculations than he used to, and letting her (or their agreed Spell) decide when he does so,
K2: taking primary responsibility for keeping his erotic energy under control,
K3: fulfilling all her sexual and sensual wishes (within what he is willing to do), and
K4: openly and honestly communicating with her on all aspects of this lifestyle,
whilst SHE commits to:
P1: using the control he has given her to enhance HER sexual, sensual and intimate life,
P2: enhance HIS sexual and intimate life so that he is equally happy,
P3: always respect his arousal and to use his erotic energy to enhance the relationship, and
P4: not having him ejaculate at most Sessions.
This sounds great on paper, only she wasn’t comfortable expressing her desires, much less knowing what they are. For Devotional Sex to work, each partner needs to focus on their commitment. Which means he must communicate his emotions, desires and challenges. She must use his energy to fuel her desire and use that energy to enhance her sexual and intimate life. But how do we each do this? Her belief being “having desires is bad, women aren’t allowed to be selfish in this way”. And for me, I can’t express my emotions. Hell, I don’t even know what they are, much less feeling comfortable expressing them.
But, unless I can express my feelings and desires, she won’t feel safe and protected. And if she can’t relax into herself and feel pleasure, the dynamic won’t work. It falls apart.
So, back to the drawing board. How to change our old scripts, how to heal from past trauma and for me, learn how to connect with y emotions and express myself. How to simply be honest about how I feel, what I need, what I desire. This builds trust so she can relax into me and feel safe that because I am expressing my real self. She knows what she is working with. Some she may like, some she may not, but in either case, at least it’s real.
This lead us on another journey over the past year and we explored the following:
I listened to a bunch of the Kink Friendly podcast with Mistress Alisa (https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?...0035e22&btn-skin=7&size=315" allowfullscreen=)
Season One is for men, Season 2 for women and Season 3 for couples. She warns that she is often a complete turn off for women, and this is true for my wife. Totally doesn’t relate. But for me, Alisa made some really good early points about “selfish sex”, letting our [very strong] masculine energy drive our sexual activity…in a very selfish way. Over time, a common theme, and that of chastity (first time I’ve said chastity in this post), helps shift the focus to her needs, desire and pleasure.
I read No More Mr. Nice Guy to learn how I got here.
https://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-N...1676992609&sprefix=no+more+mr+,aps,138&sr=8-1
This book does a great job tracing the path many of us (Gen X and younger) took in learning about our masculinity and sexuality. How we view our own masculine identity, how that has been shaped, and also how we grew up to have the sexual view point that we do. And how it creates problems aligning to and supporting the feminine.
We both read Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power (I learned about it on this site)
https://www.amazon.com/Unbound-Woma...qid=1676992772&sprefix=unbound,aps,365&sr=8-5
Here you will learn how to say and receive NO, and how to navigate it. Holding boundaries. Kasia teaches women how to re-claim their power, discover their desires and pursue those desires. As well as teaching the tools to navigate resistance (Locate, Accept, Influence), and drives home the concept of “Smush”, this middle space where mind and body are out of alignment. Often shows up when we’re trying to make someone happy, but it doesn’t match what we want. This book is fantastic for men and women, my wife and I read it together, did the exercises and it was eye opening and powerful. Life changing for my wife to be able to pin down things she experiences and how she acts, and where it came from. Now in day to day life I encounter smush every-friggin-where. Indecision, wishy washyness, ambiguity, lack of decision making. At work, in the community, call it out on each other, and things we've taught our kids.
Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure
https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?...0035e22&btn-skin=7&size=315" allowfullscreen=
This was a good book to go through the “mechanics” of female arousal and sexuality. Women often don’t learn about themselves and their sexuality. This book helps open that up and explore. It also does a good job to introduce and describe the masculine and feminine. The differences and complementary nature of each. The yin and yang symbols represent that interrelationship and when we think about men and women containing both but leaning towards one or the other, we can start to see how the puzzle pieces fit together to complement and support each other.
Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships
https://www.amazon.com/Cupids-Poiso...1676995348&sprefix=cupids+pois,aps,213&sr=8-1
We read this several years ago, and came out of it (at the time) with “yeah, whatever”. But in retrospect it’s an important step in understanding the hormonal cycle for me and why to regulate ejaculation. This is a fundamental thing learned in a chastity dynamic, around how teasing and denial works, the drop, losing focus for desiring her.
This is a good article about providing “Masculine Contentment”: https://tealswan.com/resources/articles/masculine-containment-r443/
While this may sound like a ball busting idea, think about it and some of the ideas presented. We men need to understand what women need. Not want, but need. How does the masculine provide “containment” and safety for the feminine? How do we create that safe environment? What does it mean to ‘contain’? For years my wife described what she needed from me and it made zero sense to me. Not only could I not relate, I had no idea what specifically to do. This article cleared that up for me. The masculine is powerful, goal focused, think of a river bank. The feminine is fluid. Like water, it flows with energy based on emotion and the moment. It also gets lost on the journey and makes endless to do lists and full of ideas swirling around. It needs containment, to flow…it needs a river bank. We need a purpose, and to be that riverbank and provide containment gives us the satisfaction that we have a purpose in our woman’s life. Build on that and add the richness of nuance, emotion, sexuality and the enmeshment of this together and you get a magical environment that feeds itself.
It takes work, self awareness, and practice to get there.
I proposed the idea of chastity around Thanksgiving of last year. To change up our stagnating Devotional Sex dynamic. To physically force us to push on in our exploration and growth. For me to express my desires, to push within myself to say what I wanted to explore and experience. And for my wife to grow and become more confident in her feminine and, through her feminine power, really embrace my masculine sexual energy. And to be comfortable challenging me. Women love to challenge, to have us show our true grit. With that, they know our true strength to provide for and protect them.
We needed to make it abundantly obvious that nothing intimate or sexual was going to happen unless we worked together to make it happen.
Presenting chastity was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. So out there, vulnerable and kinky. Vanilla couple us putting this on the table. My god, she's going to turn blue, laugh at me and walk out the door. Yet once I started to put the words out, it flowed like magic. And my wife was quite open minded and receptive. Everything we had done to this point, the self work, learning about each other, trying to re-create the “we”, set the foundation for chastity as a tool to help. Help me focus, help make the commitments defined in Devotional Sex work, and as a reminder and physical symbols of our commitments and role to support each other. There is absolutely a kinky element to it, but that’s the point. That’s where we are. Bring it on! My wife knows I am working to make myself the best I can, working to support her, and her trust in me is growing. My adoration and desire for her is growing as her confidence grows.
To get started, we read “Chastity: A Guide for Vanilla Wives” (https://www.amazon.com/Chastity-Guide-Vanilla-Milyssa-Morrisette-ebook/dp/B094D1CQKN) together. This gave us a foundation for the dynamic and look at different reasons to do it, and archetypes. If she does this, who does she need to become? Some whip cracking dominatrix? No…she can be herself, and as it turns out, incorporate this role into the woman she wants to become (see the next book). Chastity plays a balanced role in our lives, for me as a way to reign in the lizard brain and more easily put my focus on ‘us’ and other things. It polarizes my sexual energy and focus on her. I feel less ‘scattered’. It’s like putting a leash on a pet lion. Suddenly that beautiful, powerful lion can be tamed. It will roar and chase prey or tackle threats when it needs to, but can also calm down and sit by her side and be her calm protector. It’s hard to describe, but just works.
We also read articles on the “Evolving Your Man” website (https://www.evolvingyourman.com/ )
and adopted the rules from the Happy Marriage website (https://happy-marriage.neocities.org/) to establish clarity that a) we are agreeing to do this and b) we’re going to follow some rules so when we slip back to old habits and “smush”, we can call each other out and get back on track. Without knowing where you’re going and who you want to become, it’s easy to fall back to old habits, “lock and forget”, or for him to get resentful. Resentment is OUR responsibility. We feel resentment because we are not expressing our needs. We need to own that. Lock and forget can be because she doesn't see herself in this role, she doesn't understand and isn't seeing the point. Guys need to explain it, have a higher vision for themselves...don't resent, take action and explain.
I think for many couples exploring chastity, it does start as “his kink”, and over time they learn and back into the lessons we’ve learned. We built up to chastity as part of our growth and exploration. Doing some of that foundational work to understand yourself, your scripts from your past, understand the dynamics in your relationship and focusing on improving those fundamentals will help with improving intimacy, communication and sexuality and pave the way for things like chastity. And make exploration easier. Looking at it in reverse order, we built up to chastity, whereas many couples start with chastity. Then they see a dynamic grow and benefits unfold as they learn and make discoveries in themselves that very much align to our journey. I wonder if they kind of stumble into him learning how to meet her needs, and her learn the power of teasing and denial and how just ‘right’ that is in the flow of masculine and feminine.
Theoretically we could completely forego chastity and get to this same point. Thinking about Tantra and learning control of sexual energy, ejaculation control, and circulating energy. Just having a vision, making a choice and having the will power to "just do it".
Or for serving women, and attuning to feminine needs and desires, and how to complement the feminine because it's the right thing to do. Or take the religious context of unity of man and woman and commitment to each other.
I go back and forth about chastity, sometimes it feels perfect, other times I question whether it is me taking the easy way out of really confronting my old concepts of male sexuality and I need to ‘man up’ and go it straight on.
But chastity so perfectly aligns to where we are and as a force multiplier in helping me focus on what I need to do. So right now I’m an advocate.
I recently started reading the Evolved Masculine
https://www.amazon.com/Evolved-Masc...3601&sprefix=evolved+masculine,aps,141&sr=8-1
“The Evolved Masculine gives a strong and flexible roadmap for healthy masculinity and relationship success for men that embraces our innate sexuality. Full of hard-won wisdom and revolutionary insights, Destin reveals first-hand how the treacherous waters of male sexuality can be navigated with integrity in the post #metoo world. A must-read for any man that wants to be part of the solution AND have deep sexual and relationship fulfillment.”
This book rolls up everything needed to re-envision yourself and provides a path to becoming that new man you envision. My wife and I started re-reading it last night, and she loves the visualization exercise, and how Destin writes. Instead of being mired in “self help” and retrospective analysis of “why am I the way I am”, he says yeah, learn all that, but then go forth and become the person you want to be. Have fun with it, play with it, try on different personalities, envision who you want to be and internalize and day by day, step by step adopt new habits and become that person. We’re having fun with this now as we continue our journey.
This is all I have time for for now, but wanted to get these thoughts down as a starting point for future posts on our journey. Lots of "woo woo" here, but it's all come to make sense to us. There are several members here whose stories I really relate to, so I think there are more who have found ways to improve their relationships, rediscover themselves the the “we” of their relationships.
(Note that this is what we did and what has worked for us. There are as many paths and reasons to do something as there are people and couples. I think our background and experiences will resonate with a certain population, and I hope this helps give some ideas. I know for others, their motivations for things like chastity may be vastly different.)
My wife and I had hit a wall, after having had children, raising them, work life, school life, all the day to day. Our “us” relationship had all but disappeared, with all of the typical symptoms. Lack of desire, distance, lack of communication, distractions like masturbation and porn, emotional disconnect (from ourselves and each other), and we had no idea what to do about it.
A few years ago we did start working on ourselves, understanding our history, learned scripts from childhood and why we behaved the way we did. Why we weren’t able to talk about our needs and desires, me disconnected from my emotions, her from her sexuality. We had no idea what we needed for ourselves, much less for each other.
Then, a little over a year ago I found Devotional Sex (http://www.devotionalsex.com/), which provided a great framework for us to begin to build a dynamic between us that started to re-balance our masculine and feminine energy and sexuality, to focus less on male penis/orgasm driven sex and start to put her needs and desires more as the focus. We struggled with this because of…well, learned behavior. The foundation of Devotional Sex has 4 commitments for him and 4 for her, and says:
Devotional Sex is when HE commits to:
K1: having far fewer ejaculations than he used to, and letting her (or their agreed Spell) decide when he does so,
K2: taking primary responsibility for keeping his erotic energy under control,
K3: fulfilling all her sexual and sensual wishes (within what he is willing to do), and
K4: openly and honestly communicating with her on all aspects of this lifestyle,
whilst SHE commits to:
P1: using the control he has given her to enhance HER sexual, sensual and intimate life,
P2: enhance HIS sexual and intimate life so that he is equally happy,
P3: always respect his arousal and to use his erotic energy to enhance the relationship, and
P4: not having him ejaculate at most Sessions.
This sounds great on paper, only she wasn’t comfortable expressing her desires, much less knowing what they are. For Devotional Sex to work, each partner needs to focus on their commitment. Which means he must communicate his emotions, desires and challenges. She must use his energy to fuel her desire and use that energy to enhance her sexual and intimate life. But how do we each do this? Her belief being “having desires is bad, women aren’t allowed to be selfish in this way”. And for me, I can’t express my emotions. Hell, I don’t even know what they are, much less feeling comfortable expressing them.
But, unless I can express my feelings and desires, she won’t feel safe and protected. And if she can’t relax into herself and feel pleasure, the dynamic won’t work. It falls apart.
So, back to the drawing board. How to change our old scripts, how to heal from past trauma and for me, learn how to connect with y emotions and express myself. How to simply be honest about how I feel, what I need, what I desire. This builds trust so she can relax into me and feel safe that because I am expressing my real self. She knows what she is working with. Some she may like, some she may not, but in either case, at least it’s real.
This lead us on another journey over the past year and we explored the following:
I listened to a bunch of the Kink Friendly podcast with Mistress Alisa (https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?...0035e22&btn-skin=7&size=315" allowfullscreen=)
Season One is for men, Season 2 for women and Season 3 for couples. She warns that she is often a complete turn off for women, and this is true for my wife. Totally doesn’t relate. But for me, Alisa made some really good early points about “selfish sex”, letting our [very strong] masculine energy drive our sexual activity…in a very selfish way. Over time, a common theme, and that of chastity (first time I’ve said chastity in this post), helps shift the focus to her needs, desire and pleasure.
I read No More Mr. Nice Guy to learn how I got here.
https://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-N...1676992609&sprefix=no+more+mr+,aps,138&sr=8-1
This book does a great job tracing the path many of us (Gen X and younger) took in learning about our masculinity and sexuality. How we view our own masculine identity, how that has been shaped, and also how we grew up to have the sexual view point that we do. And how it creates problems aligning to and supporting the feminine.
We both read Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power (I learned about it on this site)
https://www.amazon.com/Unbound-Woma...qid=1676992772&sprefix=unbound,aps,365&sr=8-5
Here you will learn how to say and receive NO, and how to navigate it. Holding boundaries. Kasia teaches women how to re-claim their power, discover their desires and pursue those desires. As well as teaching the tools to navigate resistance (Locate, Accept, Influence), and drives home the concept of “Smush”, this middle space where mind and body are out of alignment. Often shows up when we’re trying to make someone happy, but it doesn’t match what we want. This book is fantastic for men and women, my wife and I read it together, did the exercises and it was eye opening and powerful. Life changing for my wife to be able to pin down things she experiences and how she acts, and where it came from. Now in day to day life I encounter smush every-friggin-where. Indecision, wishy washyness, ambiguity, lack of decision making. At work, in the community, call it out on each other, and things we've taught our kids.
Women’s Anatomy of Arousal: Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure
https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?...0035e22&btn-skin=7&size=315" allowfullscreen=
This was a good book to go through the “mechanics” of female arousal and sexuality. Women often don’t learn about themselves and their sexuality. This book helps open that up and explore. It also does a good job to introduce and describe the masculine and feminine. The differences and complementary nature of each. The yin and yang symbols represent that interrelationship and when we think about men and women containing both but leaning towards one or the other, we can start to see how the puzzle pieces fit together to complement and support each other.
Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships
https://www.amazon.com/Cupids-Poiso...1676995348&sprefix=cupids+pois,aps,213&sr=8-1
We read this several years ago, and came out of it (at the time) with “yeah, whatever”. But in retrospect it’s an important step in understanding the hormonal cycle for me and why to regulate ejaculation. This is a fundamental thing learned in a chastity dynamic, around how teasing and denial works, the drop, losing focus for desiring her.
This is a good article about providing “Masculine Contentment”: https://tealswan.com/resources/articles/masculine-containment-r443/
While this may sound like a ball busting idea, think about it and some of the ideas presented. We men need to understand what women need. Not want, but need. How does the masculine provide “containment” and safety for the feminine? How do we create that safe environment? What does it mean to ‘contain’? For years my wife described what she needed from me and it made zero sense to me. Not only could I not relate, I had no idea what specifically to do. This article cleared that up for me. The masculine is powerful, goal focused, think of a river bank. The feminine is fluid. Like water, it flows with energy based on emotion and the moment. It also gets lost on the journey and makes endless to do lists and full of ideas swirling around. It needs containment, to flow…it needs a river bank. We need a purpose, and to be that riverbank and provide containment gives us the satisfaction that we have a purpose in our woman’s life. Build on that and add the richness of nuance, emotion, sexuality and the enmeshment of this together and you get a magical environment that feeds itself.
It takes work, self awareness, and practice to get there.
I proposed the idea of chastity around Thanksgiving of last year. To change up our stagnating Devotional Sex dynamic. To physically force us to push on in our exploration and growth. For me to express my desires, to push within myself to say what I wanted to explore and experience. And for my wife to grow and become more confident in her feminine and, through her feminine power, really embrace my masculine sexual energy. And to be comfortable challenging me. Women love to challenge, to have us show our true grit. With that, they know our true strength to provide for and protect them.
We needed to make it abundantly obvious that nothing intimate or sexual was going to happen unless we worked together to make it happen.
Presenting chastity was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. So out there, vulnerable and kinky. Vanilla couple us putting this on the table. My god, she's going to turn blue, laugh at me and walk out the door. Yet once I started to put the words out, it flowed like magic. And my wife was quite open minded and receptive. Everything we had done to this point, the self work, learning about each other, trying to re-create the “we”, set the foundation for chastity as a tool to help. Help me focus, help make the commitments defined in Devotional Sex work, and as a reminder and physical symbols of our commitments and role to support each other. There is absolutely a kinky element to it, but that’s the point. That’s where we are. Bring it on! My wife knows I am working to make myself the best I can, working to support her, and her trust in me is growing. My adoration and desire for her is growing as her confidence grows.
To get started, we read “Chastity: A Guide for Vanilla Wives” (https://www.amazon.com/Chastity-Guide-Vanilla-Milyssa-Morrisette-ebook/dp/B094D1CQKN) together. This gave us a foundation for the dynamic and look at different reasons to do it, and archetypes. If she does this, who does she need to become? Some whip cracking dominatrix? No…she can be herself, and as it turns out, incorporate this role into the woman she wants to become (see the next book). Chastity plays a balanced role in our lives, for me as a way to reign in the lizard brain and more easily put my focus on ‘us’ and other things. It polarizes my sexual energy and focus on her. I feel less ‘scattered’. It’s like putting a leash on a pet lion. Suddenly that beautiful, powerful lion can be tamed. It will roar and chase prey or tackle threats when it needs to, but can also calm down and sit by her side and be her calm protector. It’s hard to describe, but just works.
We also read articles on the “Evolving Your Man” website (https://www.evolvingyourman.com/ )
and adopted the rules from the Happy Marriage website (https://happy-marriage.neocities.org/) to establish clarity that a) we are agreeing to do this and b) we’re going to follow some rules so when we slip back to old habits and “smush”, we can call each other out and get back on track. Without knowing where you’re going and who you want to become, it’s easy to fall back to old habits, “lock and forget”, or for him to get resentful. Resentment is OUR responsibility. We feel resentment because we are not expressing our needs. We need to own that. Lock and forget can be because she doesn't see herself in this role, she doesn't understand and isn't seeing the point. Guys need to explain it, have a higher vision for themselves...don't resent, take action and explain.
I think for many couples exploring chastity, it does start as “his kink”, and over time they learn and back into the lessons we’ve learned. We built up to chastity as part of our growth and exploration. Doing some of that foundational work to understand yourself, your scripts from your past, understand the dynamics in your relationship and focusing on improving those fundamentals will help with improving intimacy, communication and sexuality and pave the way for things like chastity. And make exploration easier. Looking at it in reverse order, we built up to chastity, whereas many couples start with chastity. Then they see a dynamic grow and benefits unfold as they learn and make discoveries in themselves that very much align to our journey. I wonder if they kind of stumble into him learning how to meet her needs, and her learn the power of teasing and denial and how just ‘right’ that is in the flow of masculine and feminine.
Theoretically we could completely forego chastity and get to this same point. Thinking about Tantra and learning control of sexual energy, ejaculation control, and circulating energy. Just having a vision, making a choice and having the will power to "just do it".
Or for serving women, and attuning to feminine needs and desires, and how to complement the feminine because it's the right thing to do. Or take the religious context of unity of man and woman and commitment to each other.
I go back and forth about chastity, sometimes it feels perfect, other times I question whether it is me taking the easy way out of really confronting my old concepts of male sexuality and I need to ‘man up’ and go it straight on.
But chastity so perfectly aligns to where we are and as a force multiplier in helping me focus on what I need to do. So right now I’m an advocate.
I recently started reading the Evolved Masculine
https://www.amazon.com/Evolved-Masc...3601&sprefix=evolved+masculine,aps,141&sr=8-1
“The Evolved Masculine gives a strong and flexible roadmap for healthy masculinity and relationship success for men that embraces our innate sexuality. Full of hard-won wisdom and revolutionary insights, Destin reveals first-hand how the treacherous waters of male sexuality can be navigated with integrity in the post #metoo world. A must-read for any man that wants to be part of the solution AND have deep sexual and relationship fulfillment.”
This book rolls up everything needed to re-envision yourself and provides a path to becoming that new man you envision. My wife and I started re-reading it last night, and she loves the visualization exercise, and how Destin writes. Instead of being mired in “self help” and retrospective analysis of “why am I the way I am”, he says yeah, learn all that, but then go forth and become the person you want to be. Have fun with it, play with it, try on different personalities, envision who you want to be and internalize and day by day, step by step adopt new habits and become that person. We’re having fun with this now as we continue our journey.
This is all I have time for for now, but wanted to get these thoughts down as a starting point for future posts on our journey. Lots of "woo woo" here, but it's all come to make sense to us. There are several members here whose stories I really relate to, so I think there are more who have found ways to improve their relationships, rediscover themselves the the “we” of their relationships.
